John and I have been charging full steam and enthusiastically ahead with the visa process. We’ve been collecting photographs of us from friends and relatives, digging out old correspondance, applying for police certificates to prove we’re of good character and I’ve booked in for an immigration medical check. All was looking good until we called the NZ immigration advice line at 6.30am this morning.

We can’t apply for a partner residency visa until we are able to prove that we’ve been living together for 12 months. Unfortunately we can only really cite the 12 months living together in Sydney because when we were living together in the UK John was officially my tennant, and there’s no real evidence of us living as a couple as all our bills were in my name and what with John’s move to NZ and Oz, and my move to Oz, everything that might have been of use got chucked. The 12 months are up on 29th May, but the snag is we need to provide our passports as part of the visa application  and I’m coming home to the UK for a month on 23rd May and I’ll obviously need to have my passport with me. It seems that they won’t accept anything instead of an actual passport, and they’re likely to want to hold on to it for 4 weeks.

This means that we can’t submit our application until I get back to Oz at the end of June. We’re feeling a little dispondent about it, but also hugely relieved that we turned down John’s Dad’s offer to stay with them in Fiji in July, otherwise it would be another month before we could submit.  We’re hoping that this delay won’t affect our overall planned timescales for our move, we’ll just have less warning between visa application approved (positive, but hopefully realistic thinking) to boarding our flight to Wellington.